2009/6/30 Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>:
> Hi Folks,
>> As usual, we're planning a major release of GHC around September. Here's our
> list of the main items currently scheduled for 6.12.1, and their status. If
> you have the time and inclination to help with any of these, please get
> involved!
>> * Parallel performance. 6.12.1 will ship with the improvements to parallel
> performance described in our ICFP 2009 paper. Still to do: overhaul the
> +RTS GC settings, tune for good performance by default.
>> * Parallel profiling: the new RTS tracing features will be included, and we
> hope to have a release of ThreadScope to coincide with GHC 6.12.1.
> ThreadScope is written using gtk2hs, and could benefit from someone with
> expertise in producing polished gtk2hs apps - if you can lend a hand,
> contact Satnam Singh <satnams at microsoft.com>.
>> * Unicode I/O: the new Unicode I/O library is in, and will ship with 6.12.1.
> Still to do: decide on the public API for changing encodings and newline
> conversion.
>> * Shared libraries: we intend to ship with shared library support on at
> least x86/Linux and x86-64/Linux. There are various tasks remaining to do
> here - Duncan, can we have a summary?
>> * Data Parallel Haskell. Manuel, can you comment on the state of play?
> What can we expect in time for 6.12.1?
>> * Plugin support in GHC. The patches are not yet in GHC, and as far as I
> know are awaiting review - Simon, can you say more?
>> * The new backend code generator. At the moment, it seems unlikely that GHC
> 6.12.1 will ship with the new code generator enabled by default, although it
> may well be available for testing. Meanwhile, work on it continues.
>> The smaller items are all embodied in tickets, here are the tickets
> currently in the 6.12.1 milestone (135):
>>http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&milestone=6.12.1>> and on the 6.12 branch (251):
>>http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&milestone=6.12+branch>> I estimate there are 2 man years of work here - needless to say, we aren't
> going to fix all these tickets :) As usual, if you want to vote for
> something, add your email to the CC field of the ticket.
>> Several of these tickets would make good tasks for a fledgling GHC hacker.
> e.g. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2362 (allow full import
> syntax in GHCi) has a lot of support, and is a nice self-contained task (but
> not a small one).
>> Even if you're not a GHC hacker you can still help, e.g. by helping to
> narrow down the cause of a bug, or verifying a bug on your platform.
>> Let me remind people that GHC HEAD has the new build system, and it's
> actually rather pleasant to work with. Even if you have no idea what you're
> doing, you can always say 'make' at the top level and the build system will
> figure out what needs doing (ok, so that's what build systems are supposed
> to do, but GHC's has never quite managed it until now!).
It won't help a lot but ... Thanks for all those things, especially
shared libraries support !
Thu